Let it never be said that if you’ve seen one inspirational sports movie, you’ve seen them all.

Sure, Nitesh Tiwari’s Bollywood crowd-pleaser “Dangal” follows a formula: Father abandons his dream of being an international wrestling champion. Father hopes for a son who will live out his dream for him. Father ends up with four daughters.

Father discovers that two of his daughters are dexterous brawlers. Father declares, “From now on, they will only wrestle.” Father trains those daughters, in defiance of the villagers’ tut-tutting and assumptions about women’s roles, to mud wrestle, and instills in them a spirit of feminism.

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Fatima Sana Shaikh in “Dangal.”CreditUTV Motion Pictures

Wherever “Dangal” goes — a highlight reel might include the older daughter rising from mud wrestling to pro, getting a new coach and beating up her jealous father, who later trains her by couriered video after being barred from the sports academy — it goes there in the maximalist Bollywood style, with emotions set to full blast and its heart firmly on its sleeve.

Based on the true story of Geeta and Babita Phogat (played as children by Zaira Wasim and Suhani Bhatnagar and as adults by Fatima Sana Shaikh and Sanya Malhotra), who eventually competed in the Olympics, and their trainer-father, Mahavir Singh Phogat (Aamir Khan), the movie benefits from the amount of time it devotes to wrestling strategy. It pays off in suspenseful bouts that haven’t been hyperedited into incoherence, with actresses who really appear to be grappling.

Because this is Bollywood, the training montages are accompanied by sprightly pop music, though not as choreographed song-and-dance numbers. And as goosed as the drama gets (only sports historians can say if Mahavir became trapped in a janitorial closet during the 2010 Commonwealth Games), the uplift feels earned, or at least tough to resist.